* ‘Tis the seaon to be Jolly – Craig

Toronto’s Jolly Roger has added director Wayne Craig to its roster. Craig will start with the company on Jan. 15, making the jump from Imported Artists.

Craig represents Jolly Roger’s sixth director and its third Canadian, along with fellow Jolly Canucks Curtis Wehrfritz and David Tennant.

Says Jolly Roger executive producer James Davis: ‘We feel Wayne’s skills with actors, sense of humor and uncomplicated filmic approach will complement our existing roster of directors.’

With Imported, Craig received this year’s Saatchi & Saatchi/Playback First Cut Award.

* Holiday Greeting from Cuppa

Toronto’s Cuppa Coffee Animation is putting the finishing touches on a new spot for American Greeting Cards’ Bubblegum line. The spot is an unusual mix of a number of different styles, resulting, says Cuppa creative director Warren Brown, in a Warhol-esque look that is fun and very different.

Having been with Cuppa Coffee for only eight months, the Bubblegum assignment is Brown’s first job as creative director. The spot offers a combination of efforts and was completed entirely in-house at Cuppa Coffee’s studios on Richmond Street in Toronto.

Brown says the spot was quite difficult to put together, thanks mostly to the complexity of the various types of imagery used in its creation. Cuppa Coffee started the process by bringing in Toronto-based director Chris Grismer (Clutch) to film some live-action footage of young people.

‘We shot them in very drab, monotone-looking clothing and then dropped all of the color out of the footage,’ says Brown. ‘We’d then drop in big areas of skin tone and big areas of bright color for the clothing and animated behind the actual footage.’

There was also a cel animation component where the Cuppa Coffee animators animated the characters seen on the actual Bubblegum cards. This proved tricky, because Cuppa Coffee had to take the one-dimensional character seen on the cards and fill in the rest to create the 2D characters in the ad. At the same time, After Effects artists were working on getting the backgrounds just right.

When the smoke finally clears on the spot, Brown and Cuppa Coffee will have created eight cel characters and three silk-screen-looking, live-action sequences, a la Warhol, all within a 30-second spot. The Bubblegum Greeting Cards spot was made through Doner, with Adam Shaheen executive producing and Marlene Schmidt producing for Cuppa Coffee. The spot is set to air in the u.s. in February.

* Udderly fantastic

Looney, toony Toronto-based Chuck Gammage Animation has been hard at work completing a new pair of spots for Ford. Based on the success of the 1998 Ford ad created by Gammage featuring the Three Little Pigs, Young & Rubicam producer Doug Lowe contacted veteran animator Chuck Gammage for two new spots, ‘Safe Hood’ and ‘Eraser.’

‘Safe Hood’ features the Big Bad Wolf character from the ‘Three Little Pigs’ spot, this time chasing Little Red Riding Hood (she is saved by Granny in the 2000 Ford Winstar). ‘Eraser’ sees the return of the popular pigs, whose progress in their new Winstar is being impeded by an elephant.

‘I actually think these are better than last year’s,’ says Gammage.

Also out of the shop is an internationally airing spot called ‘Obstacle Course,’ the first for Kellogg’s new Cereal and Milk Bars. Made through Leo Burnett International, Gammage and his cohorts were brought in to breathe life into an animated super-hero-like cow named Uder, armed with a milk gun (attached directly to its udder), shooting Kellogg’s popular cereal brands and turning them into the Cereal and Milk Bars.

The spot’s writer and art director George Longley at Leo Burnett first approached Gammage about designing Uder based on some drawings that Longley had made. The two shot ideas back and forth for about a month before the current tv-ready bovine incarnation was complete.

‘We went through different directions on Uder and we came up with a really appealing character,’ says animator/director Gammage. ‘It took a while because it’s a brand new character. It takes time to develop something like that.’

After the animation was finished, Gammage sent the spot to Toronto’s TOPIX/Mad Dog for post, where, still under Gammage’s direction, the 2D animation of Uder as she tackles a series of obstacles on her way to completing her milky mission was interwoven with 3D images of the cereal boxes and the bars themselves, created by t/md. Anne Deslauriers, t/md senior producer, admits this was not an easy task.

‘When the milk splashes onto the boxes, the milk is cel, the boxes are 3D, so TOPIX/Mad Dog was responsible for integrating the two media together,’ explains Deslauriers. ‘It’s finicky work and you’ve got to get it right and make it look seamless.’

The ‘Obstacle Course’ spot is currently airing in the u.k., France and Ireland, and will hit the airwaves in Germany, Mexico, Iceland and Belgium in the new year. At press time, it was not known if the spot will air in Canada.

* Hyslop’s New Year’s gift

Angel Films director James Hyslop is putting in some overtime this holiday season. In addition to finishing the documentary Polar Skies for Discovery Channel and Screenlife, Hyslop is busy writing and directing a Global Television New Year’s Eve special, Our Country, Our Century: An Evening with the Canadian Prime Ministers. The special will air nationally Dec. 31 from 10 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. and will feature interviews and footage of pms over the last 100 years.

In other Hyslop news, the director’s feature script Wednesday 9:00 am has been selected by the National Screen Institute-Canada for its Features First program. Naturally, Hyslop will direct the project.

* Walsh’s Frog Pond Vegas-bound

The Players Film Company director Bradley Walsh’s short film Frog Pond has been invited to screen at the Las Vegas International Film Festival. Frog Pond will be running with the feature October Sky. Walsh’s film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.